FOR SOMEONE WHO’S BUILT MOST OF HIS POLITICAL CAREER on the rote demonization of the media, Donald Trump has mastered the studiously inane reflexes of noncommittal corporate reporting. Our forty-fifth president was awkwardly forced by the ugly events in Charlottesville to face the consequences of a penchant for racist hate-mongering that has marked his entire adult life. (To quickly review: Trump’s race hatred stretches back to the segregationist opening chapter of his real-estate career, while featuring a call to execute the innocent black and Latino defendants in the Central Park five case, the notorious truth-mangling Obama-birther crusade, and ugly campaign displays of white-supremacist rancor too numerous to recount here.)

It’s easy, then, to see why Trump’s first reflex, when beholding the unvarnished consequences of his vile blood-and-soil rhetoric in real time, should reach for the most threadbare alibi of hate-enabling discourse in the American mediasphere: the insistence that, in any divisive controversy in public life, all sides, by definition, must be somehow equally culpable.